Quick Hits From Las Vegas

I know I’ll miss some things from my trip to Las Vegas last week so I’m compiling a list of quick hits so I don’t forget some of the minor details that may interest.

BNBLV– Awesome. Beer and Blogs Las Vegas is a gathering over beer with bloggers, tech heads and nerds. I met a bunch of people I follow on twitter and met some new faces. I expected to be at the happy hour for 30-60 minutes and I was there for 4 hours. Good times. Nice to meet y’all!

Orleans – File under a place I no longer need to visit. Very similar to Gold Coast, but slightly more depressing. Low ceilings and smoke don’t help. Unless I’m in the area (which I doubt) I don’t see myself visiting again.

Free Shuttles – Orleans has a shuttle to Bills on the strip. This was a bus of drunks, but it saved another $20 (or so) cab ride.

Tourists – I don’t like them. They move slowly and/or stop abruptly constantly being in the way. The Las Vegas strip is full of these people and they ruin the experience. I recommend walking on the CityCenter (west?) side of the strip if you need to get from one place to the other. You can throw old people in here too. Ludacris mirrors my thoughts here.

Strip walking – I haven’t walked the strip in a while, but I did twice last weekend. The walks were great, but made worse by tourists and old people. I did find one way to make the strip walk enjoyable. Stop at each casino and either tweet or drink. It breaks up the monotony. Sure it took me about 30 minutes to get from Palazzo to Planet Hollywood, but at least I had fun. That was better than my drunk strip walk the previous night from Bills to Palazzo.

Go-Go dancing in casinos – No longer cool or interesting. This doesn’t work for all casinos. Check Mandalay Bay and Excalibur for reference.

Lucky @ O’Sheas – Little man has great pipes. He was outside of O’Sheas shouting out facebook and twitter offers with a deep booming voice. He fit O’Sheas marketing image perfectly.

Flamingo – Low ceilings still give it an old feel, but it seemed as if there were a bunch of updates in the casino that gave the look a bit of a modern feel. In my quick walk through it seemed as if the casino was caught between their history and being current.

Aria Tram – I don’t like heights. The tram platform is bordered with glass which gives it an edgeless look. It probably looks cool to many, but I don’t like this at all. I don’t like heights and between the station shaking and the feeling like can fall off at any moment I won’t go up there again. I’ll just walk.

Celebrity Sightings – One morning I saw Joan Rivers leaving the Palazzo. That was awesome. Later that night I was playing blackjack at Palazzo and saw Brad Garrett across the way. He’s the brother in “Everybody Loves Raymond”

Palms, Hard Rock, Bellagio – All places I normally make it a priority to visit. Since I was alone I decided to visit places that I don’t normally visit – for better and worse.

The rest of my trip will be delivered in separate posts with pictures. These are items that are small and I didn’t want to leave out.